


The World Shines

by CybeleUnchained



Category: Original Work, The Mountain Goats (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Happy Ending, Mild knife play, Non-Graphic Violence, Smut, geomagnetic storms, going to georgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:59:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28068927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CybeleUnchained/pseuds/CybeleUnchained
Summary: Danny is on a road trip under very trying circumstances. The world is going to shit all around him and he just wants to get back to his girl. There are a number of obstacles, one of which is the fact that he's not exactly sure where she is going to be, another is the catastrophic flipping of the magnetic poles and a series of solar storms. This has a kind of disaster movie vibe. But like a smutty, fluffy, angsty disaster movie where barely anyone gets hurt...
Relationships: Original Characters - Relationship
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	The World Shines

**Author's Note:**

> OK so there is a chance that the poles will reverse but it's not going to happen all in a rush like this- dramatic licence dudes. So don't start worrying about that on top of everything else. Although I may have been googling how to build a Faraday cage... If you want to know more about the science there's a good article here https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/earth-magnetic-field-flip-poles-spinning-magnet-alanna-mitchell/
> 
> One of The Mountain Goats' most popular songs is called Going To Georgia but John Darnielle, has disavowed it because he fears it fails to properly condemn gun violence and misogyny. I still love the song so I tried to imagine a setting which made the gun understandable and the guy not a douche.

We humans are amazingly resilient creatures. One way that we cope with disaster is by pretending that it’s not happening. Like apocryphal frogs in gradually heating pans we do nothing at all until we’re already cooking. The Earth’s poles were reversing. Everyone knew it was happening and yet most of us just carried on doing the same dumb shit we’d always done, ignoring the signs, waiting it out. Solar storms increased in ferocity as the planet’s geomagnetic field glitched in and out like an unreliable phone signal. Gradually the internet was lost as servers fried and collapsed. Just when you needed to google “How to survive a solar storm” you couldn’t. In comparison losing GPS felt like a minor irritation to most people. Pigeons and sea turtles coped less well with the failure of their navigation systems. Bees had already been in trouble so, once they were disorientated, their dances sent their hive mates off in all the wrong directions and that was about it for them. Thanks and good night to the planet’s main pollinators. And so the crops fail and we’re as dumb as shit now because Wikipedia is off line forever so we have no clue as to what we can grow that’s self pollinating. So we eat beans out of tins. And the power grid fails so we eat cold beans out of tins. And without communication satellites, computer databases and the mass media, government can’t function which means no-one is coming to help. The weird thing about the end of a civilisation is how easy it is to ignore it. Right up until it’s not. As Yeats says “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”  
_________________________________________________

It was a bad decision and deep down he’d known it from the start. That’s why he was pissed at himself more than at anyone else. She’d known it too but it wouldn’t occur to her to make his choices for him or try to second guess him, just like he’d never want to control her. His agent had insisted that he had to fulfil the terms of his contract or, he threatened ominously, the studio would demand that he repay the advance and, at the time, that’d seemed like a big deal. It was weird how things that seemed important then were so obviously trivial now. It was the same sort of illusion that made objects in the rear view mirror seem closer than they are. The day he left, things were looking weird and unsettling but certainly not apocalyptic. Surely, he thought, someone would work out a way to get the internet back up in pretty short order. The military would want the surveillance they’d come to depend on, Jeff Bezos and all the other geek billionaires would be on it like ducks on a junebug and some tech nerd would figure it out and everything would go back to normal. Like everyone else he had no clue how any of this shit worked so he didn’t know what was and wasn’t possible. So he flew to Seattle on one of the dwindling numbers of scheduled services to go do the dumb fucking press junket, feeling anxious about it, not wanting to leave her alone, wanting to call up his agent and tell him to get fucked. But he hadn’t done that. He’d gone to Seattle because that’s where the show was set and they wanted “local colour.” As he let himself out of the apartment, she’d called after him from their bed, from the bed where she’d just made love to him like he was the best man that had ever existed, “Be safe Danny. I miss you already.”

  
The next day he was in some hotel suite with a clichéd view of the Space Needle throwing trite remarks at a vapid journalist for a website that was never going to get back into operation and being asked where he got his goddamn ideas from, when the publicist bustled in and told them they were suspending all the interviews. They’d reschedule “in due course” when “things got back to normal.” Everyone accepted that it would be tough to promote a TV show in the midst of a global cataclysm. Of course it turned out nothing was ever going back to that kind of normal again. The publicist told him not to panic, which was when he really began to panic. There had been a geomagnetic storm, a big one, which had taken out all the power grids on the east coast. Free flowing electricity surges through power cables and fries transformers and then your toaster blows up in a shower of sparks…amongst other inconveniences like the breakdown of society. It would take “some weeks” before the supply was back. This was back when no one had really worked out how hard it was to manufacture electrical components with no goddamn electricity. There were satellites falling to earth all over the continental US and planes were grounded for the foreseeable future. The publicist told him that his room was on hold for him and she would let him know when it would be safe to travel. He pointed out that his wife was alone in New York City, with no power and no communications. Did she really imagine he was going to sit on his ass and wait it out, leaving her to fend for herself alone in a Gotham City nightmare? “Well Mr Fraser, it doesn't look like you have much choice. No public transport is running to the East Coast and you certainly can’t drive it from here.”  
”Watch me,” he said and grabbed his jacket, heading for the door. He’d fucking walk it if he had to.

  
He fumbled for his phone in the elevator, not daring to hope that he’d be able to get through to her but trying anyway. He couldn’t even get a dial tone. He longed for the halcyon days when he would have been able to ask Google to direct him to a car rental place, he could have reserved the vehicle on the way there and driven off in about ten minutes. That wasn’t going to happen. He had to actually interact with a human at the concierge desk.

  
“Car hire?” he asked as he ran up to the desk.

  
“I can’t get a phone line sir. I’m sorry. I can get you a cab.”

  
“No, just give me directions. I can’t take a cab to New York.”

  
“You can’t drive to New York sir.”

  
“I know, I know, it’s, what, four days driving or something? That’s fine.”

  
“No, you literally can’t go there. They’re trying to evacuate the most vulnerable, no one else in or out. There have been loudspeaker announcements telling everyone to stay put. There might be more surges. No one’s going to rent you a car to go further east than, I don’t know, Spokane or something.”

  
“Directions. Now.”

  
The concierge told him how to find a rental place six blocks over and he set off at a jog. His heart was pounding now. She was going to be worried about him, she would have no way of knowing what the hell was going on or whether it was just the city or the whole country, even the whole world. The food in their freezer was thawing but there was a bodega down the street. Would she try to get provisions laid in? Would that be safe? Would there be looting? Would she be able to secure the apartment? He had left his wife alone, vulnerable, and swanned off across the country to talk about a fucking, cocksucking TV show. If something happened to her, if someone hurt her…well he’d have to kill himself. That was all there was to it. So he’d drive to New York, he’d go up to the apartment. Either she’d be fine and he’d never let her out of his sight ever again or she would be dead, murdered, whatever, and then he’d kill himself. Fine. A plan.

  
He got to the car rental place and tried to calm his breathing. No good to look panicked. “Hi, any SUVs available?” he asked with an inauthentic smile, producing his credit card.

  
“Hi sir. Where are you headed to today?” asked the young woman with a plastic smile. Nothing about her was authentic, from the hair to the teeth to the breasts.

  
“Just down to Portland. I’m in town for a meeting but my boss has decided to stay over what with all the craziness. I need to be getting home. I can drop the car off in Portland right? At the airport?”

  
“Sure thing. Will that be tomorrow?” she asked brightly, filling in actual physical paper forms.

  
“Yeah, I’ll drive it out there in the morning,” he smiled. There was at least one transferable skill from being a writer; he was a pretty decent liar. She reached under the counter and brought out an ancient credit card imprinter that looked like it had been unearthed by an archeologist.

  
“I know right?” she laughed, catching his expression. “These things are changing hands for hundreds of dollars. Who knew they’d be worth holding onto?” She processed his payment by referring to a handwritten checklist and he signed the slip with an honest to god pen like it was 1986. She handed the keys over and reminded him that he couldn’t use the GPS. “We have some paper maps but I guess you don’t need one to get to Portland huh?” she laughed and he joined in.

  
“No, I think I can find my way home from here. Thanks so much. Keep safe,” and he was outside in the lot, matching his paperwork to the vehicle. He didn’t bother to check the paintwork like he normally would. If he ended up buying the car that’d be fine with him. In moments he was pulling out of the lot, on his way to her, on his way home.

  
He didn’t bother stopping back at the hotel for his bag. He had his useless phone, his wallet and his keys. He had his journal in his jacket pocket, a folding knife, a pack of smokes and his lighter. What more could a man need? Having thought about that for a second and about the apparent scarcity of credit card imprinters he decided that a man driving across the country could use a good roll of cash. If he got to the buttcrack of South Dakota and no-one would sell him gas then he’d be royally screwed. He stopped at a strip mall ATM, queued for almost twenty minutes and made a maximum withdrawal. They were limiting to $500 but, he reasoned, the banks couldn’t instantly communicate his transactions anymore so the daily limit had to be a thing of the past. He’d grown up rough, motorcycle gangs and petty larceny, which meant he knew you never put all your cash in one place so he distributed it in various pockets. Would she draw cash? She’d grown up fancy. Would she keep all her money neatly lined up in her wallet? Would someone try to take it from her? If they did would she roll over as she should or would his brave, fierce girl fight? God, he hoped not. He drove on, stopping at another ATM to do the same thing again. He dropped into a 7-11 and grabbed a selection of food, water and energy drinks that would have made her roll her eyes and suggest trail mix and carrot sticks. He apologised to her in his head but he was going to need sugar and caffeine if he wasn’t going to end up wrapped round a road sign in Wyoming.

  
He was heading East, looking for signs for the I90. It should be pretty easy just to follow that across country and then get on the I80 in Ohio somewhere. He’d try to get maybe to Montana tonight, sleep a little in the vehicle and then drive through tomorrow. Maybe he could even get to Toledo, rest up a for a few hours with Outlaws and then be in New York late Sunday. He was able to soothe the panic by planning. Thinking about finding Outlaws made him run his fingers reflectively over the tattoo, which made him think of her. Her, just before he left, running her tongue over the image of the snake coiled around a skull, humming against it. “My Outlaw. So hot. Show me your knife, lover.” So he’d reached for his jeans, thrown in a heap by the bed, grabbed the folding knife with the wicked blade and flicked it open while she looked at him and licked her lips. He’d taken the tip of the knife and rested it on her bottom lip before running the back of the blade so gently between her breasts, down her belly while she panted. He’d slipped the blade under the lace where it lay over her hipbone and, with a twist, snickered through it. It had made her gasp. He did it again on the other hip and peeled away the remains of her underwear knowing exactly how she wanted him to touch her. Fuck it, now he was hard. He needed not to think about her. “Oh I’m sorry honey, you were terrified and alone? I’d have been here sooner but I had to keep pulling over to jerk off because I have the self control of a horny fifteen year old.” Thinking about her being in danger killed his excitement quicker than her mother walking in on them when they were sixteen, his hand tentatively under her shirt, pulled back in a flash, as Ms Jensen stared at him like he was some sort of pervert.

  
He found the interstate and, with a glance around to check for cops, put his foot to the floor and gunned it. He picked up a local radio station that was still broadcasting. All the national networks seemed to be out. The DJ was saying they’d had reports and rumours that things were going bad fast in the big eastern cities. Hospitals without power, emergency generators fried along with everything else. Apparently the water supplies were running low because the power to run the pumps was out. There were fires all over caused by sparks that flew from electrical equipment when the surge hit and soon there would be no water to fight them, even if the fire department knew where they were. Their apartment was on the fourth floor. Would she know about water supplies needing power? Would she have filled the bathtub? What she knew often surprised him.

  
She’d always surprised him. When they were first lovers, as teenagers, she’d shown him a sexually daring side that he’d never expected from the straight arrow cheerleader. She had darkness that he hadn’t suspected was there but which, when she showed it to him, made him love her with even fiercer devotion because he recognised it as the reflection of his own. She’d surprised him again when she broke up with him in the first semester of college. That had been less of a thrill. He’d thought the pain would kill him. He’d been all in for the four year long-distance thing. He’d thought she wanted it too but at Thanksgiving she’d travelled to Amherst and broken his heart in a hotel room he could barely afford and got the train back the same night. She tried to explain but he couldn’t wrap his head around any of it. She wanted them to have the whole college experience, she didn’t want to be the clichéd small town girl who marries her high school sweetheart and knows nothing else, she wanted both of them to be able to make decisions just for themselves without always worrying what they would mean for the other. She wanted to know what it would be like to be a single, independent adult, not just part of a couple. “You want to have sex with other guys?” He didn’t want to think about that but if that was what it would take to keep her…

  
“God, Danny, don’t be such a guy about it. Not everything’s about sex you know. It’s more than that.” He lost the power to speak and just sat there, in the hotel room while she talked. Eventually he begged her to stop.

  
“Just go, Mary. All the talking isn’t going to make me OK with this. I don’t need you to list all the ways you don’t want me. It’s not like I can tell you that I can be different or that you haven’t got to know me properly. You’re the only one who does know me. And you want to be rid of me. So just go.” She left, her face white and rigid with emotion; he sat on the floor and cried like a child for hours, like he had every time his mom had rejected him.

  
The pain was always there and he knew with certainty now that who he was, if he revealed it, wasn’t good enough. It made him cruel for a while. If he couldn’t be good enough he’d be bad, he’d be the worst. He had other girls but, without understanding what he was doing, he chose ones who were already hard and cynical. Always brunettes. His roommates joked that he had the most specific taste of anyone they’d ever met. Thin, angry dark haired girls who hated themselves almost as much as he hated the world. There was one who he kept going back to to hurt again. He cheated on her, he ghosted her, he waited until she met someone else and then pulled her back to him by just lifting an eyebrow in her direction. There was no excuse for how he had treated her but he had been as hurt by it as she was. Every time he was with her he hated himself more. Eventually he ended it for good, apologising to her and promising that it was over forever. She pleaded with him, told him she loved him, offered him everything, begged him to keep hurting her and suggested new ways he could do it. He walked away from her, feeling almost nothing.

  
It was a bad time but gradually he found a kind of life. He swore off relationships, threw himself still deeper into his writing, using it as a kind of therapy to exorcise the ghost of her. He wasn’t happy but, like the Fisher King, he could live with the wound. One of his professors, Larry, saw something in him and invited him to a writer’s retreat in senior year where he started writing the novel which earned him an agent and a book deal. When he crossed the stage to collect his degree he had the advance in his bank account and the manuscript finished, proofed and ready for publication. And then there she was, in the audience, smiling nervously next to his dad.

  
She came over shyly, waiting until after his dad had hugged him, his eyes suspiciously shiny, telling him how proud he was. “Hi Danny ,” she whispered. “If you’d rather I leave just say so. I don’t want to spoil your day. It was just, I knew I’d be sure to see you here. I wanted to say something, if you’ll hear me.”

  
“What do you want Mary?” he’d asked trying to keep his voice neutral, keep out the anger and fear so she didn’t hear what he’d become.

  
“I want you Danny. I want to tell you that I was wrong and I’m so sorry. That sounds laughably inadequate. There was just something in me that needed to blow everything up, to set fire to my life just to watch it burn. I burned you too. If you can never forgive me then I understand. I don’t deserve to be forgiven but you need to know that you were always what I wanted and needed, even when I didn’t understand that. I’ve always loved you. I’ve accepted that I always will.”

  
The tiny ember of hope in his chest was hurting him, like a hot coal held in a closed fist. He decided to bear it. For her.

  
Sometimes even now, years later, he’d wake up and find her looking at him with such tenderness that tears would spring into his eyes. The first few times he’d ask her what she was thinking and she’d say she couldn’t believe that he’d forgiven her, that anyone could be so generous. He told her that he loved her so there was no question of not forgiving her. He told her that the Danny who forgave her wouldn’t have existed without the pain and that he was glad to be exactly who he was. He explained that because of the pain he knew, without question, that he must never lose her. Who knew who he would have been if they’d stayed together since high school? Maybe he would have been the kind of guy who thinks the grass is greener, maybe he would have strayed, maybe he would have lost her forever. They couldn’t know.

  
He was crossing into Idaho when he realised that his face was wet with tears. Remembering who he was without her, imagining that she might, at this moment, be in danger or hurt or scared or even lost forever was making him crazy. He tried the radio again, hoping for information or distraction. The signal was weak but he picked up another local station, its identifier would be a bad draw in scrabble. The guy speaking, sounding shaken, was saying that there had been another solar storm over the south west. SoCal was in the same plight as the eastern seaboard apparently. He continued to drive through the darkness, aware of an eery glow in the sky, wondering if there was a refinery fire or something until he realised that he was seeing the aurora borealis. In Idaho. He switched off the static crackle of the vanishing radio station and connected his phone, playing hip hop to drive out the terror, glad that he eschewed the streaming services, refusing to let “the man” know about some of those guilty pleasures in his music collection. He drove through forests for hours, his eyes growing heavy, turning up the volume and opening the windows so as not to make more intimate acquaintance with the trees.

  
He couldn’t bear thinking about how she was coping anymore so he started a mental inventory of friends and family. His dad and Susie would, for now at least, be safe in Denver. He was glad that his pop had decided to move with her when she started her degree. He felt for Susie though. He couldn’t imagine that there would be a career for a multi media artist in the foreseeable future. He wondered if she would even be able to get her diploma. Maybe degrees and careers and even art were things that people worried about in the past. Maybe now there would just be survival. He thought about the big break that his career was on the brink of. Gone now he guessed.

  
Larry, the prof who had taken an interest in his career, had started to invite him to the writer’s retreat as a contributor rather than a participant after the first book had made it big. There had been literary awards and a substantial revenue stream which had surprised him. He’d imagined he’d always be a struggling artist. At one of those retreats at Larry’s place down in what she always affectionately called “Nowhere, Georgia” a TV exec had been telling them what was required of writers in the era of binge watch TV shows and gestured at Danny as an example of what the networks were looking for. After the session Jeff had approached him and suggested they “sit down” with a view to “making this thing happen” and suddenly Danny was a TV screenwriter adapting his own books and, amazingly, with the book sales and the studio advance, a millionaire. She’d come with him to Georgia, loving the peace and solitude, so that night, back in their little cabin she told him that she’d always known he was brilliant but now that he was rich and brilliant she felt compelled to blow him until his brain turned to pudding. Which she did. Now, he supposed, there would be no more TV shows. The advance had been prudently invested in stocks which were probably worthless. What he had to offer her now were his hands and his heart. He’d find her and he’d take care of her.  
That line of thought suddenly struck him as all wrong. In the first instance what was he going to do to protect her, damn it even to feed her, in a shitty Williamsburg fourth floor walk up? Besides she wasn’t some terrified little creature who needed him to step up and take care of her. She was strong and defiant and so smart. They would have to get out of the city, find somewhere safe where they could be self sustaining. Things were not magically going to get better. A burning city with no water and no reliable food supply was not a place they wanted to be. And, of course, she would have reasoned to this way before him wouldn’t she?

  
A few weeks ago they’d been trailing a real estate agent around fancy apartments in Manhattan looking to spend the advance on somewhere with an elevator and space for a washer drier when he’d noticed her expression. It was the “I’m not into this,” expression that he’d seen more than a few times when they first got back together after college. There had been a few months when she would go along with whatever he suggested, never demurring, never complaining. He knew her though. There was an edge to the smile, a shadow behind the nod, that told him that all was not well. She used to be able to play a part that convinced her mother, it even convinced most of their friends but he knew what lay behind the mask, hell he loved what lay behind it. He tested his hypothesis by telling her he liked her in a dress that he knew she found uncomfortable. The next date night she came into the living room in the dress, the light in her eyes just slightly dimmer. He took her hands, sat on the couch with her and told her what he saw. She began to cry. “I need this to work. I can’t live without you again. I can’t. I broke it. It’s my fault. I’ll do anything to make it right.” He’d explained that he only wanted her if she could be her authentic self. He didn’t want some doll that he could pose and dress up. The thought of her stifling herself like that made him feel nauseous. He made her promise never to be what she was imagining he wanted because all he ever wanted her to be was her.

  
In the Greenwich Village apartment with the realtor, he thought she was breaking her promise. He asked her about it once they got home and she agreed that she felt ambiguous about moving to Manhattan. She’d always thought she’d want to live in the city forever but now she wondered if it was all too fraught. He could work anywhere, her online journalism work was increasingly sporadic as the internet became vulnerable and she was wondering if maybe she should get her teaching certificate. And, she said, hesitating, testing the waters, what if they had kids? Kids need space and fresh air not sirens and scene of crime tape in the lobby. Finally she said it. She thought maybe she wanted to make a baby with him.

  
He swallowed hard and maintained his composure. He’d never wanted to push her but to have a family of his own, to be a little kid’s daddy was something he’d hardly let himself dream of. “Well, where then? Back home?”

  
“Oh God, as if! No, nowhere?” He must have looked confused because she clarified. “Nowhere Georgia? I like it there. Maybe we could have one of the cabins while we look for a house. I don’t know, if you thought you might like it.”

  
“The south Mary? I’ve never really thought of us as southerners.”

  
“Just an idea. Let’s think on it. It’s a big decision.” But they’d stopped viewing apartments and everything in the city had been starting to feel temporary. Would she get the hell outta Dodge when the shit hit the fan? Or would she hunker down and wait for her man to rescue her? How could he know?

  
He filled the tank and bought a couple of extra cans just outside Butte. Now he’d thought about pumps and electricity he was going to make sure he had gas just in case. Then he pulled off the highway and slept for a couple of hours, waking with a start of panic in the early morning, his neck stiff and his back sore. He noticed that the street lights were out and there was a smell of smoke in the air. It felt ominous. No radio stations were broadcasting and even the static sounded weird. He was glad the car was a makeshift Faraday cage protecting him if the solar storm had been raging about him while he slept. The panic in his chest was becoming a thundering terror. New York or Georgia? North or south? Eventually he decided to put off the decision. He needed to head east anyway.

  
He began thinking about their friends Mark and Diane as he drove. Their separation just a couple of months ago meant that they wouldn’t be facing this together. Diane was in Europe with Mark back in Cooperstown in his mom’s house, in his childhood bedroom. Mark would be fine even without power or a phone signal. He responded well to practical problems, maybe with his physical strength and his unfailing optimism he was the best equipped of all of them to thrive. Diane on the other hand would be desperate. Danny and Diane had struck up an unlikely friendship, the blue collar artist and the privileged princess turned businesswoman. It was strengthened when he found out that she had been, in part, responsible for his reunion with his girl. Apparently she had carried out an intervention when Mary had yet another meltdown about not being able to maintain a relationship. Diane pointed out that she kept trying to have the same relationship over and over again. There had been a series of skinny, dark haired guys, Justin more emo, Sam more bad boy, Adam more tender poet. “B you’re just trying to find Danny which is crazy because you know exactly where he is.” Mary tearfully admitted that sex only worked for her when she imagined the guy was him and that she hated herself for using these guys to replace him rather than caring about them for themselves. “So go get your man, girl.” Diane urged her. She had protested that he’d never forgive her, that it was futile but as Di said if she didn’t try then she’d always wonder if she could have had what she really wanted rather than being disappointed by these blurry Xeroxes of him.

  
He drove past the signs for Yellowstone, the highway skirting forests and past reservations. There were few cars and when he saw towns there always seemed to be smoke rising from them. He pressed his foot on the gas pedal harder. He was going to have to make a choice eventually. He started to see small groups of people walking alongside the highway, some of them carrying ill assorted items, chairs, pots and pans, bundles of linens, those huge blue bags he recognised from Ikea. It looked like every news item he’d ever seen about refugees. He saw a family, two little girls pushing doll’s strollers piled with their treasures and his heart hurt for them. The thought that he could offer them a lift drifted through his mind but then he thought of her, walking beside another road, miles away, all alone and he drove past them, on his own mission. He realised that he could no longer imagine her in the apartment. When he thought of her it was on the road. She would go, and she would expect him to know where. Nowhere. She was going to Georgia. Even with the poles shifting, north becoming south and all points in between, his heart was a compass whose needle pointed unerring toward her.

  
The road became its own place, towns he’d barely heard of passing by, Livingston, Laurel, Billings. People looking shell shocked, a few cars, older models, no electric vehicles of course, always rising smoke. She would have fetched the bike from the parking garage, he realised. She didn’t love riding it like he did but it was easier to fuel it for a long ride, it would slip through traffic and it was fast. She was on his bike going to Georgia.

  
He remembered the last road trip they’d taken on the bike. She’d been giddy and excited to be getting out of the city. She’d planned the whole thing, yelling directions as they went. They headed up Long Island Sound eventually arriving in New Haven. It was her college town but he’d never visited. It was her life without him and he didn’t understand why she’d brought him. “It was the saddest, most confused time of my life Danny. I want to show you this place, make memories here that have you in them, to redeem it I guess.” She showed him cafes she loved, art galleries, a rare book library that made him jealous of her college experience. They also spent a lot of time in their room at the bed and breakfast place she had found. She had taken charge that weekend, telling him that she wanted to make his dreams come true, that she wanted to show him how she loved him. Sex hadn’t always been easy between them since their reunion and he loved that she was growing more confident about being able to please him. She knew what he liked, even anticipated his darker desires and she gave herself over to his fantasies. As he made love to her she whispered, “Hold my wrists Danny, hold them tight above my head,” and he could hardly contain how much he loved her. Another time, murmuring, “Put your hand on my throat Danny. I trust you,” his heart pounding out of his chest. Another time, “Can I bite you, lover?” Then, when he was spent and exhausted and so fucking happy, she rolled off him, looked into his eyes and asked him to marry her. He had said “Yes, please,” and reached into the pocket of his jacket to find the ring box he’d picked up from the jewellers the week before and had been carrying around, waiting for his moment.

  
As he passed by Rapid City he started to notice homemade signs by the side of the road, mostly near intersections. “Joe, Louisa and baby at grandma’s.” “Rich, don’t go home.” “Anyone knowing whereabouts Alexis Whitby report New Underwood sheriff. Food reward.” Tiny glimpses into lives and stories he’d never know but his writer’s mind couldn’t help imagining backstories for Joe and Louisa and trying to imagine where Rich would go. Then he began to see the hobo signs. His dad had taught him the symbols when he was a kid, clearly enjoying that he had something to teach a child who always seemed thirsty for knowledge. So his dad taught him the signs for “safe neighbourhood” and “easy mark” and “kind lady lives here.” As he drove he tried to recall the meanings of the symbols and as the gas tank ran down he wracked his brain for the sign for fuel. He recognised “safe water”, OXO with a wave above it, and pulled off the road to find himself at a gas station by a water tower. The gas station was deserted, the door off its hinges and the pumps were all useless without power but the washrooms were supplied from the tower with no pumping required. He filled the bottles that had held energy drinks and washed himself as best he could standing in the bathroom in his underwear. There were chips and candy bars scattered on the floor. He hesitated before gathering them and throwing them into the car. He had a feeling his money was of no use to anyone now so he didn’t trouble to leave it, knowing that she would have been making mental calculations as to the amount to leave, probably with a thank you note. He smiled at that.

  
As he pulled away he remembered the symbol for fuel, three circles in a tower, decreasing in size as they went upwards. He needed to find a gas station with a functioning generator powering the pumps or he really would be walking to Georgia. His eyes were stinging with tiredness, his back creaking but every time he thought of stopping he imagined telling her that he had been too late to protect her or comfort her because his back was sore and he knew he couldn’t live with that so he carried on driving. He’d left Butte at dawn, it was approaching seven in the evening when he saw the hobo sign he’d been looking for, the tower of circles with the word Humbolt and an arrow. He drove on for ten minutes, the gauge looking perilous but then he saw honest to god electric lights on the road; a gas station, with power. His heart soared. He pulled into the gas station, so relieved that he didn’t take proper observation. It was a stupid mistake. He was no sooner out of the car than five guys were surrounding him. He was worldly enough to recognise their intentions and resignedly he pulled out his wallet and his phone, preparing to hand them over. They laughed in his face. “No use to us fella. What else ya got?”

  
“Really nothing. Travelling real light guys.”

  
“Food? Booze? Gold?”

  
“There’s a candy bar or two. Nothing you’d call supplies. Certainly no valuables. Sorry to have wasted your time. I’ll just be on my way yeah?”

  
That was when one of them laid a hand on him. It was pretty much always a mistake to lay a hand on him. Until things got physical he could be smart but when they started to push him about, something in him would break free and he would fight back. It’d happened a couple of times in college, some jock thinking the skinny guy with the book bag could be pushed about. Once the jock had been someone important’s son. Now he was someone important’s son with three false front teeth and a kink in his nose like the world’s least successful boxer. Larry had bailed him out of jail and told him that that shit was not going to fly if he wanted a career. Danny had listened, firmly shutting a door that led him down the path his father had travelled. Larry had taken to calling him Norman in homage to Norman Mailer, another brawling writer.

  
In the gas station he threw a punch and went for his knife. The guy he’d hit went down and the one that saw the knife took a step back, hissing through his teeth in alarm. They’d thought they were getting some suburban guy in his SUV and what they actually got was a man who’d hard-scrabbled his way out of poverty, fought better men than them when he was still a child and who had a mission to be somewhere that only death would stop him from reaching. He got in some decent thrusts with the knife; at least one of them would always have a scar to remember him by, but against five he wasn’t ever going to win. Eventually he was down, the greasy tarmac reeking of gas, the kicks to his chest and stomach piling into him. He knew he would die here and he very much wanted her face to be the last thing he saw so he started struggling to reach his phone where it had fallen, leaving his head unprotected. There was a boot in his face and then an explosion. The kicking stopped. Maybe he was dead.

  
Even now he was struggling to reach his phone. There was a voice, elderly by the sound of it. “OK fella. You lay still a minute. Let’s see what the damage is. Lay still will ya?” He wouldn’t, still grasping for the phone. “Who d’ya wanna call? Ain’t no signal. OK, OK, here ya go. That what ya want?”

  
The phone was in his hand and he pressed the screen, her face lighting up the darkness and he sighed, closed his eyes and expected to die.

  
When he came round he wished he hadn’t. There was a great deal of pain. Really, he thought, with a kind of academic interest, it was hard to imagine that so much of his body could hurt so intensely at the same time. He was on a couch in a room that looked like a Norman Rockwell interior. “Hey hey young man. Back in the land of the living. That’s good to see. I’m too old to be digging graves in the back yard. I’m Aldo.” Danny looked up into a pair of crinkled blue eyes under a ratty old baseball cap. “Jennet, he’s alive honey.”

  
Jennet was an elderly woman who bustled over and began to fuss over him. “OK sweetheart. You got yourself beat up pretty good but I don’t think there’s too much broken. Strong bones I guess. Cuts and bruises I reckon. Now you’re awake we’ll get some ice on that cut on your face. Such a pretty face, we don’t want that to spoil do we?”

  
“Stop yer flirting woman. I told you he’s got a girl. Had to look at her picture when he was all bloody in the dirt over there. Made me near about tear up, I can tell ya. Now I looked in yer wallet Daniel to try to see what you were doing out on the road so I guess you want to get home to New York but I can tell you that’s a long shot. What we’ve heard from people going the other way is that the roads are all blocked and the city’s in a bad way.”

  
He struggled against the pain to sit up a little and through bruised lips managed to speak. “Danny, I go by Danny. Thank you so much. They’d have killed me. I’m going to Georgia. She’s in Georgia.”  
Aldo explained that he’d been scouting for fuel when he’d seen the ambush in the gas station. “I don’t like to see that. Men acting no better than coyotes. Still good folks is good folks and bad folks are bad. You just get to see it clearer in tough times.” A shot in the air had been enough to send them scattering.

  
Jennet was back with the kind of icepack that he’d only ever seen in cartoons. How did they have ice? He suddenly realised that he was sitting in a room with an illuminated light bulb. They had power. It felt like the last couple of days had been a bad dream. Had the geeks got their shit together? Aldo saw him staring around himself and chuckled. “Prepper,” he said, pointing at his chest. “I’d hate to say I told you so… but I fucking told you so.”

  
Jennet swiped a playful slap on his arm. “I tell you young man, he’s going to be unbearable about this just forever. But I have to admit the generator and the food stocks and the independent water supply are pretty useful right about now. I even forgive him for all that fussing about with metal mesh down there.”

  
“You put the generator in a Faraday cage didn’t you? You’re a genius. Why the hell weren’t we all doing that?” Danny was filled with admiration for the way the older man had correctly gauged what mattered.

  
There was a home cooked meal despite the late hour, meat loaf and mashed potatoes, corn and greens. Danny ate in the way that pretty much only he could as Jennet looked on indulgently. He told them about her, about the junket, about Nowhere, Georgia and they started to plan how to help him make it work. The rental car was in the wind, Aldo had got him out of there in his pick up truck but when he went back an hour later the gas station was deserted and dark. “I’ve got vehicles but most of ‘em are pretty much armoured. You’d need gas every couple of miles. Don’t suppose you can ride a motorcycle can ya?”

  
Danny had never wanted to kiss a man as much as he wanted to kiss Aldo at that moment. After dinner he struggled out to a barn with his protector and saviour to be introduced to a 1960’s Indian Velocette. It was an Italian bike with an American brand and it was light and quick and gorgeous. “Aldo, I’ve got plenty of cash but I’m not sure what good that is to you. I don’t know what I can give you for this. She’s a beauty.”

  
“She’s going to sit here and rust away Danny. You take her and look after her. Write us a letter when you get your girl and let us know you’re OK. That’s payment enough. My Jennet loves a love story. It’ll make her happy to be part of yours.”

  
Under strict orders from Jennet he rested up for a day, watching with detached curiosity as the bruises blossomed over every inch of his skin. He thought about where she might be. Aldo quite naturally had paper maps in every scale and Danny looked at the routes that she might take from NYC down to Ideal, Georgia. He thought that if she had the supplies she’d try to avoid the cities, hug the coast if she could. He tried to picture her, riding through the colonial past of the nation, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia. He hoped he was right and that he wasn’t abandoning his wife, hiding frightened and desperate in Williamsburg.

  
He still couldn’t really believe that he got to call her his wife. He would always introduce her formally to people, “This is my wife, Mary Jensen-Fraser. She’s a writer too. Journalist.” She would tell him he didn’t need to make introductions but he explained that he liked to say “my wife” and she would laugh. Sometimes she would show that wicked side that he loved so much precisely because it was rare. She’d push her way ahead of him and make the introductions instead.

  
“Hi, I’m Mary. This is Danny Fraser. He’s a genius, and a brilliantly talented writer and he’s my husband. I know, I know, you’re thinking there’s no way that can be allowed. No-one ought to be brilliant, talented and as hot as that and you’re right but them’s the breaks. He just is.” It had gone wrong once. At a book launch party she’d done just that and when he looked round with a laugh on his lips he’d seen a familiar face, her dark hair scraped back into a tight ponytail because he’d once said he liked that. She looked like someone had stabbed her with a burning spear, agony on her face. For the first time he realised that he was to her what Mary was to him and he felt such sorrow and sympathy for her that he put his hand on Mary’s arm and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. She looked perplexed but then she saw the girl staring at them with desperate intensity so she kissed the side of his face and headed off to talk to his publisher’s partner.

  
“Hey. This is a surprise,” he said, hoping that they could keep it light.

  
“Not really. I’ve been trying to get invited to one of these things for years. Now I see it was a waste of time.” She was staring at Mary. “She’s a fucking blonde Daniel. I thought you hated blondes.”

  
“No, not a blonde. She’s the blonde. I’m so sorry. It was always her. You absolutely have to let it go.” Her face was a mask of agony and he understood completely how she felt. He had no idea how to make it hurt less. It twisted him inside to see her suffer and know it was his fault. “I’m sorry Leah, this is all I ever wanted in the world.” He held up his ring finger and she stared at him, speechless and then turned on her heel and walked away. Mary was there, holding his elbow and looking at him sympathetically. “I was such a douche to her Mary. I can just hear myself telling her what a crock marriage was, warning her that that wasn’t ever going to happen if she stuck with me, trying so hard to push her away. I’m the worst.”

  
“I hate that she got hurt Danny. I feel bad but if you really were mean to her, was she in love with you even though you hurt her or was she in love with you because you hurt her?” He knew it was the latter, that she’d been broken before he met her but he still hated that he’d made it worse. He’d always feel guilty and that was as it should be.

  
The next morning he ate Jennet’s buttermilk pancakes and bacon before saying his goodbyes. He’d taken note of the address so that he could send the promised letter if there was ever a US postal service again. Jennet was anxious because they had no leathers or helmet to give him but he was secretly pleased to have an excuse to feel free and light without them constraining his battered skin. She shed a tear or two and Danny and Aldo made the appropriately macho noises required of them at a sentimental farewell. As he pushed the bike down their pitted driveway Aldo came after him and passed him an oil cloth package. “I couldn’t give this to you in front of Jennet. She hates guns. I guess she’s right to but these are bad times. Watch out though, the safety catch is busted. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.” Danny swung his leg painfully over the saddle of the bike and he was off.

  
His journal had a bloodstain all along one edge which struck him as an appropriate symbol of his journey. He had noted the road numbers and interchanges, the directions sometimes hard to decipher over the rusty mark of the blood he’d spilled to travel this road. After every couple of hours he would pull over, check the journal and stretch a little. By lunchtime he was outside Kansas City and he stopped to let the bike cool off and ate some of the food Jennet had packed. She had made huge sandwiches from corned beef that didn’t come from a store with her own pickles. He guessed that this was something that they would have to learn. Hell they’d have to learn how to cook over a fire unless the lights were still on in Georgia. He doubted it.

  
By the time he reached Nashville he was so exhausted he could barely hold the bike upright. It was frustrating to be so close and yet be too physically weak to keep going. Aldo had made him a bedding roll and he pulled the bike off the highway and unpacked it. He took the Colt 45 and tucked it under the blanket and slept fitfully for four hours. He would see her tomorrow if he had guessed right. If not he would be heading to New York against the tide of fleeing humanity.

  
He was up before six, longing for coffee with no means to get any. His breakfast was a cigarette and a strip of Aldo’s home cured jerky. Every part of his body was sore and stiff but he coaxed the bike into life and got on the road. His stomach was knotted with fear and dread and excitement and a hundred more feelings that he couldn’t separate from each other, like strings of Christmas lights tumbled in a cardboard box. He rode towards the only real home he’d ever known, her.

  
He could almost taste her. He could bring her so vividly, so palpably into his mind. He’d been her man for eleven years. Even when they weren’t together he was entirely her creature. When she had first returned his kiss, when she had insisted that he share even his shame with her, when she had given him her fears and imperfections to hold in his hands she had tied him to her with bonds that he would never break. Ever since the first time he’d made love to her he felt her more intensely than seemed possible. She’d trembled against him, gasping and whining while he tried to make it good for her, holding off, holding off, holding off, trying to make her come by the force of his will, now, now, now. He’d been a kid, he didn’t know what would happen if she came, didn’t know what he’d feel. Then something happened, suddenly she felt limp in his arms, the tension flowing out of her and he was out of control, falling and shaking, shocked because it had never been like that when he jerked off under the shower, stifling the moan so his dad didn’t hear through the paper thin walls. For a moment he was free of the fear and the shame and he was enough. He felt good enough. Then she was stroking back his hair, telling him she loved him, that he was so good to her, that it was what she’d hoped for, that he was hers. Without her, sex wasn’t about his feelings, it became about making the girl lose control while he set himself apart, watching like she was a specimen. He’d make her cry with frustration by keeping her just at the edge and then either he’d casually finish her and roll away, still hard but denying her his pleasure or he’d come just too suddenly before she got there and note with interest whether she’d fake it or get mad.

  
When they got back together after college he couldn’t make love to her for months. He’d touch her, make her come with his fingers, but when she tried to touch him he felt his flesh recoil. His body wouldn’t trust her. It remembered the physical pain of losing her and now, even when he’d decided to take her back, it still hurt, sometimes as much as when she’d left him in that Amherst hotel room. He tried to apologise and she yelled at him through tears. “Don't you ever fucking dare apologise to me for having been hurt by me. Don’t you dare. I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait forever if I have to. You’re worth it. Tell me what you want. We can just hold hands. There’s never any expectation of you. Never.”

  
He’d been living with Mark and Diane in Scranton. They had a room over the garage and he needed somewhere to work on the second book. Then one afternoon she came over and sat on his bed and asked him to move in with her in Williamsburg. It seemed a strange idea, they were trying to fix it but when he couldn’t even get hard for her it seemed reckless to shack up. “But I can’t even screw you Mary. You can’t want me like this.”

  
“Well I do. I want to wake up with you every day. I want to go grocery shopping with you, I want to sit and read your chapters in the laundromat, I want your hands on me. If you want me, I’ll take what you can give me for as long as you can give it.” So he moved in and they began to work back through those teenage milestones, his hand on her breast over the sweater, under the sweater, her hand on him outside his jeans, his cock pulsing into a response finally. Her seeking his approval to unzip him and slide her hand into his boxers as they watched a movie, stroking him gently, letting him get hard slowly under her fingers. When he reached for her to reciprocate she shook her head. “It’s just about you this time Danny. Relax.” He let his head fall back against the couch and just let himself feel her hand on him, caring about him. He didn’t come the first few times but it was nice anyway. Then one day she reached for him and found him already straining against his jeans, painfully hard. “I don’t want to tease you baby. Do you want me to give you some privacy to take care of that or...?”

  
“Or?”

  
“Oh Danny, I so want to take you in my mouth but...is that too much...I’m sorry. Should I go out for a while?”

  
He just reached up and gently pushed her head down. When he came in her mouth, after years of being sure that would never happen again he laughed with the sheer joy of it. She sat up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and looking like the most debauched creature he’d ever seen. They hardly got out of bed that week. It all taught him that while it was mind blowing to have sex with her, that they were still them without that. The grocery store, the laundromat, the everyday domestic shit was their relationship too. It was all important.

  
Now he was riding to her and everything seemed more technicolor than was possible. He seemed to be seeing the world in greater focus. He kept trying to remind himself that he was following a hunch. She might not be there. He passed Atlanta at about nine in the morning and it was burning just like in Gone with the Wind. There were refugees on the roads again but he couldn’t stop for even a moment. And then he was passing Ideal, ten minutes and he’d know.

  
He pulled into Larry’s place, the big house ahead, the cabins surrounding it. And here was Larry, glaring at him suspiciously and then, recognising him, sliding open a gate and pointing at the cabin they’d stayed in last time they were here. He knew they’d talk later. The door was open. She stood in the doorway. She was the most extraordinary thing in the world and, at the same time the most familiar. Her hair was aglow in the late morning sunlight. Her face was transfigured by joy and she stumbled forward. He climbed off the bike and just stood staring at her dumbly, unable to believe that anything so good could possibly happen to him. She ran at him, fitting herself into his arms and murmuring her thanks to God or the universe or fate or love. “How did you know? I was so scared you’d go to New York.”

  
“Everyone knows where their home is Mary.”

  
She’d taken his hand and led him inside her fingers fluttering light as a butterfly over the bruises on his face. “God Danny, you really can take a punch can’t you?”

  
“Mostly kicks actually. A septuagenarian rescued me this time. I owe him a letter.”

  
“Good thing I lugged that thing down here on my back then,” she grinned. She’d brought his Underwood. There it stood on the desk, a stack of paper next to it on one side, three packs of Marlboro and a lighter on the other.

  
“You were pretty sure I’d make it then?” He grinned and was surprised when her eyes filled with tears.

  
“I thought maybe I’d never see you again. I’m not sure if this is an altar or a, I don’t know, like a summoning. I set it out and hoped it’d draw you back to me somehow. I know that’s dumb.”

  
“Well it worked. Here I am. Now if it’s OK with you can we just go to bed for about a week?”

  
They made love, they slept, he told her about Aldo and Jennet and the northern lights in Idaho and Atlanta burning. She told him about the sirens and the news warning of the solar storm a few minutes before a total blackout. It had urged them to draw water and unplug everything. It hadn't mattered because the first surge made everything spark and crackle anyway, even with the flexes dangling. She hadn’t even stopped to consider her options. She’d packed the essentials, including a heavy vintage typewriter, left a note on the door in case he went there, picked up the bike, made sure the tank was full and hit the road. She’d left the city while the rest of the population were panic buying ramen and pasta without stopping to consider how the fuck they were going to cook any of it. She hated the feeling that she was abandoning him. “But Danny, I just knew I had to get out. I knew it wasn’t safe for us. And it wasn’t about you or me any more.”

  
He looked at her, confused. “Who is it about then Mary?”

  
“It’s all about little Aldo or little Jennet.” she replied, and smiled at him softly, bringing his hand to rest low on her belly.


End file.
